Speaking "Out of Place": YouTube Documentaries and Viewers' Comment Culture as Political Education

Piotrowski, Marcelina

Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, v12 n1 p53-72 2015

This article examines the comment culture that accompanies documentary films on YouTube as a site of (geo) political education. It considers how viewers try to teach each other about the proper "place" of critique in response to the global, national, and local rhetoric featured in one environmental documentary film. YouTube viewers use comments to attempt to socialize as well as educate each other about political subjectivity in relation to the appropriateness of critiquing based on geography. Expanding on what Wendy Brown calls untimely critique, I propose the concept of unplaced critique to refer to events in which critique is labeled as inappropriate or "out of place," and conversely as a virtuous practice of speaking questionably. The article is based on a study of viewers' comments on YouTube in response to "Oil in Eden: The Battle to Protect Canada's Pacific Coast" (Pacific Wild, 2010), a short documentary film about political resistance to a pipeline proposal in Canada.